Following the Benghazi consulate attack in 2012, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly worked with Google to reroute email traffic away from her private computer server and use public Google mail servers instead. That clandestine move, by Clinton and Google, served to cloak her inner circle’s communications from lawmakers, public scrutiny and criminal investigators, according to intelligence sources.

These bombshell revelations shatter Clinton’s repeated claims and testimony that she solely used her private server in her Chappaqua NY home to conduct government business at State. But it also, for the first time, reveals that previously undisclosed computer servers were employed by Clinton and her aides for conducting official government business. Lawmakers have been on a dogged and often frustrated quest to secure all of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. She has maintained in interviews and testimony that all emails were warehoused on a single home home brew server during her four years in office.

According to sources, Clinton’s former and privately-paid information technology guru Bryan Pagliano worked with Google programmers to convert Clintonemail.com’s server. Pagliano, now a federal witness for the FBI in Clinton’s criminal investigation, has been granted immunity in exchange for his cooperating with federal agents. Sources confirm Clinton and her aides used Google’s servers for their private email backbone during November and December 2012, a very turbulent period in Clinton’s State Department tenure.

Last week, revelations surfaced proving Google’s internet search algorithms are weighted to favor Clinton, by scrubbing negative results and stories about the Democratic presidential front runner. However, her colluding with Google to shroud government and personal emails is far more troubling and dangerous. Google brass has been accused of intentionally boosting Clinton’s presidential campaign. Helping the Secretary of State divert email, however, likely propels Google into the realm of the FBI’s criminal investigation as a possible accomplice for potentially damaging national security infrastructure.

Clinton has stressed that the use of her private email set up was to foster the convenience of using one mobile device, not squelch transparency and skirt federal record laws. These recent bombshells, however, detail a very different story and for the first time highlight a definitive pattern of possible criminal intent for the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, sources said. The Federal Records Act mandates that all copies of all old work-related emails be preserved. Rerouting and thereby cloaking email content, few would argue, appears to violate the tenets of that law and likely many others, including the Espionage Act.

Likewise, the use of public servers shared by Google’s 425 million subscribers in 2012 raises additional concerns over the security of the sensitive, classified, TK (Talent Keyhole), and other top secret data sent and exchanged over these networks, especially when dealing with sensitive compartmented information. While a home brew server is not nearly as secure as a government-maintained computer server, both options are more reliable and safer from hackers than a public Google server, especially given the sensitive nature of correspondences sent to and from the country’s top diplomat. For several reasons, Google Mail is a problematic choice to maintain secure email because all email content is scanned, or “indexed” by robots or Google personnel. That data is ultimately stored separately by Google and thereby presents an additional security risk if the servers are ever breached. Google mail is often hacked, especially the private accounts of U.S. government brass. But this plays to the central theme of the entire email saga, as Clinton has been accused of many things except protecting her emails.

So, instead of the normal email traffic flowing through Clinton’s home server — which she maintains was guarded by Secret Service 24 hours a day — incoming and outgoing emails were instead being routed through public servers in Mountain View, California; Lenoir, North Carolina; and Council Bluffs, Iowa, according to records and intelligence sources. These servers were also shared by hundreds of millions of Google subscribers throughout the world.

In Part II tomorrow, we will examine what compelled Clinton’s stealth deal with Google and where all those “re-routed” emails might be today.